Teach Computer Science

While teaching is wonderful, worthwhile and rewarding it is a highly demanding and stressful profession.  So it is little surprise that there is  high rate of staff turnover with nearly o ne in 10 teachers are leaving the teaching profession in English schools each year citing burnout, overwork and stress as the principal reasons (Department for Education). To improve teacher retention a better work life balance is needed. In fact, reducing high workload was one of the motivations for the industrial action of 2023 by the NEU.  One area where large improvements can be made in work-life balance is the marking of student work. Teachers spend 9 hours per week marking student work (EEF, 2016) and if any reductions can be achieved in this area then we can go a long way to improving working conditions for teachers.  Some efforts have been made to automate grading using for instance self-marking online multiple-choice tools like  www.diagnosticquestions.com  or Mic...

We are a community of teachers that have developed extensive computing resources primarily aimed at the English secondary school curriculum that can be accessed here: www.mangolearning.academy .  Mango learning empowers teachers to deliver great lessons that explain complex ideas using clear and highly scaffolded teaching and learning resources. We are very excited to offer these resources for free to the community. These teaching and learning resources for computing are made by teachers for teachers and we understand the day-to-day challenges that teacher face.   The resources incorporate general and computing specific evidence-based pedagogy. We incorporated spaced retrieval practice though knowledge organisers, diagnostic questions and quizzes, for instance. We also incorporate ideas from cognitive load theory through lots of worked examples.   To help with coding we use PRIMM and block to text based pedagogical approaches.   To support literacy we address ...

In the previous post we looked at the transfer of learning from block based coding to text based languages.  Semantic waves offer a theory that help us to structure our lessons to support transfer of learning (Maton, Waite et al).  When we present concrete examples in single contexts transfer of learning is going to be weak.  We need to present multiple examples in a range of context.  This allows us to abstract out the underlaying features.  This idea of moving along a continuum between the abstract and concrete is given by the term semantic gravity.  For instance, if we talk about an algorithm in abstract terms we might say that it is a sequence of steps to solve a problem.  At this stage we have presented it as an abstract idea so has low semantic garvity.  In a lesson we might then go on and write algorithms for drawing squares.  This represents a concrete episode with high semantic gravity.  In a good lesson we might also want to gi...

When we move students on from block to text programming, we want to transfer the learning that they have made on block coding into text programming.   When we are transferring learning we want to transfer knowledge from one context into another. In moving from one context to another we need to think in an analogical manner such that when we know how to solve a problem in one domain we can use it to help us solve a problem in another domain. The use of analogous examples helps learners see the deeper structure. We do this by seeking out deep structures and remove the surface structure of a problem. This approach is called expansive framing and we have expectation of future use in a different context. In contrast, bounded framing does not have utility beyond the current learning. Current learning needs to make connections to earlier contexts from which learners are expected to transfer in knowledge to the new context. Transfer of learning does not happen by itself; the teacher ...

Metacognition and computational thinking   Children do not easily see connections between the school subjects that they learn. Nearly everything can been viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective but in secondary schools knowledge is organised and delivered and partitioned into the subjects that we are familiar with: “Maths teachers teach maths, English teachers teach English, science teachers teach science and never the twain shall meet 1 . When complex knowledge and understanding is partitioned neatly into silos like this, it is little wonder that children cannot relate learning from one subject to another. Of course, knowledge and understanding are highly interrelated and getting children to see these complex connections will enrich their learning experience. Metacognitive strategies that can be applied across the curriculum can help to break some of these artificial barriers that children see between subjects. Metacognition is concerned with “learning about learning”. ...

For many children writing code can be a daunting prospect. To help children learn to write code more easily we can use a range of scaffolded pedagogies. Initially these approaches take ownership of the code away from the students thereby giving them confidence to explore and experiment with the code.   Gradually as the students learn more and more we can reduce the amount of support until they are able to write their own programs independently.   In a previous article we looked at approaches for supporting pupils to learn to read code that included activities such as explaining, predicting and tracing code, and live demonstrations with worked examples. This follow up article presents some approaches to support pupils with writing code. Fixing broken code Children can find and fix common syntax, runtime and logical errors in a piece of code. Errors might include missing brackets, missing speech marks, spelling mistakes and missing variables declarations, for instance. Th...

Before students can write code, they need to be able to read code. Computer science pedagogy is often based around the ideas of Piaget’s constructivism - where pupils develop their knowledge through exploration, and Papert’s constructionism - where pupils learn through creating artifacts. However, evidence has shown that learners need guidance to gain useful knowledge efficiently and to organise that knowledge in a clear and logical way. They need to be able to break a problem down, remove the unnecessary detail, find patterns and think algorithmically before they can start to write programs for solving problems. Just as we wouldn’t expect a young child to write prose before they can read, we need to provide guided approaches that use direct instruction and scaffolding to help our students read code before they can be expected to write code themselves. These guided approaches are needed just as much as, if not more than, creative discovery activities. Explain the code My first approach...

Knowledge organisers are increasingly being used to support a knowledge rich curriculum in English primary and secondary schools. The knowledge requirements alone for GCSE and A level is challenging even before coming onto higher order levels of understanding and analysis on the Bloom's taxonomy. Knowledge organisers. Knowledge organisers help to support pupils in retaining and retrieving key information and help with long term retrieval through self-testing and low stakes testing in class. In themselves they are nothing fancy. Typically, they are a single page that contains key information about a topic. They contain keywords and definitions, key facts, bullet points, labelled diagrams and other essential knowledge. They do not have extended prose and no procedural knowledge and are designed in such a way that allow for self-testing. Creating a knowledge organiser is one thing but it is how they are used is what makes them so powerful. I give out the knowledge organisers near the ...

I will look at how cognitive load theory (CLT) can help us to teach computer science and particularly coding. CLT is a theory of how we learn and gain knowledge. The principal character in this field is John Sweller who is an Australian educational psychologist. It took a while for his ideas to gain acceptance in the scientific community, but they are uncontroversial and are now filtering down to secondary schools in the UK, but more slowly than they perhaps should. CLT is important for teachers because it identifies the most effective teaching methods for learning. But before I write about CLT further I need to present a simple model for how human memory works. Memory is split into short term and long term memory. Short term memory has limited capacity and can hold between three and seven chunks of information. We are consciously aware of what we are holding in short term memory. Long term memory has unlimited capacity. For us to learn anything it first needs to be transferre...

It is a self-evident truth that the role of teachers is to facilitate student learning.  For students to learn anything there needs to be a change in their long-term memory ( Kirschner et al.,  2006 ).  The problem is that no one really understands what memory is or how to define it.  But undeterred I am nonetheless going to start with a simple model of how memory works and based on what we do know about memory I will then look at how spaced practice, low stakes testing and design of our curriculum can help with long-term memory retention. Simple model of memory There is a simple model of memory that splits memory into two components: long term memory and short term memory (Wallingham).  Our short term memory directly interacts with the environment through our senses and act as a kind of filter that determines what new learning needs to be stored in long term memory.  The problem with our short term memory is its capacity is rather limited (b...